Long time passing… With apologies and due deference to Pete Seeger who wrote the original
“Where have all the flowers gone?”
in 1955. The sentiment referred to throughout the song occurred to me the other morning as I walked through Sileby Memorial park…
When Mary and I moved to Sileby, exactly 19 years ago on June 29th this year, with Tigger our dog, we would walk around the park and let the then youthful Tigger (a lightning fast whippet cross) off her lead chasing invisible rabbits as fast as she could. I tried to train her with a rubber ball, to no avail. I’d throw the ball with all my might, using a bright green two-foot long ball launcher, and it would loop ballistically almost out of sight. Tigger would wait, listening and looking with her utmost intent. The ball would PLOP and bounce a few dozen yards into the park, and off she would bound faster than a greyhound.
The trouble was, by the time she had run twenty yards or so, she had forgotten why she was running, probably enjoying the run and the freedom, and just kept going! I had to run after her, retrieve the ball and then try and get her to come back to us, where ever she was. After an hour or so of this futile dog training, Mary and I needed a sit down to gather our strength and breath, and get Tigger back on her lead for the short walk home. The photo above shows Mary and Tigger after a good chase around the park, and sitting on one of the conveniently placed (and eruditely graffitied) metal park benches.
At the beginning of the second World War most of the metal fences, railings, seats, and other ironwork that adorned our public parks, buildings, monuments and amenities were cut down to the stonework that embedded them and shipped off to the foundries, to be smelted down for use in making armaments and ammunition in the fight against our enemies. You can still see today, denuded walls, with the tell-tale rusty blob of iron at surface level in the pale concrete. As far as I can recall, there has not been a global armed conflict at that level, where we have needed to pillage, without mercy, additional scrap metal from our public spaces within the last few decades.
…and so, back to my sunny, morning stroll around the Park a few days ago: I had a few minutes to spare before the post office opened – the reason for my jaunt – so I thought I’d have a little rest and relax, soak up a bit of spring bird song, and, as they say, stop and smell the flowers. But, there was not a bench in sight! They had all been removed. All that remained of the wonderfully sited bench above was a rusty cut-off bolt hardly protruding from the weed engulfed concrete as pictured. I wandered a little further and found two benches remaining in the enclosed War Memorial garden, but the morning smokers had claimed those, and there was no room for me.
I asked our ever present community council warden, Robert Butler, what had happened to our dearly loved park benches. He informed me that they had been removed some years ago because they were being mis-used by young folk who were over partial to smoking the dreaded weed.
The song goes right round and ends with: “They have gone to graveyards everyone… Long time passing…”
Steve
